"Southern Workers and the Search for Community is the first major effort to interpret the enduring legacy of the southern textile industry, company-owned mill villages, and the union struggles of the 1930s. Focusing on Spartanburg County, South Carolina, G. C. Waldrep offers an eloquent study of the hopes and fears that define patterns of labor activism.Revealing a complex meshing of community ties and traditions with the goals and ideals of unionism, Waldrep shows how unions fed into a social vision of mutuality, equality, and interdependency already established in mill villages. This powerful sense of community, however, ultimately rested on sand. Because the villages themselves were the property of management, any labor conflict involved not only issues of wages, hours, and working conditions inside the mill but also virtually every other aspect of life. Most important, the mill owners held the trump card of eviction.Waldrep looks beyond official versions of union activity in Spartanburg County to explain the episodic and apparently erratic eruptions of labor tensions and intervening periods of calm. Drawing on private records of textile workers, their employers, and their unions during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as more than a hundred oral interviews with workers, Waldrep reinterprets the periods of ""quiescence"" that have long puzzled historians. Documenting the high stakes of labor protest in mill villages, Waldrep shows how the erosion or outright destruction of community systematically undermined the ability of workers to respond to the assaults of employers overwhelmingly supported by government agencies and agents.Beautifully written and persuasively argued, Southern Workers and the Search for Community opens the gates of southern company towns to illuminate the human issues behind the mechanics of labor."

As evidence by the quality of these essays, the field of southern labor history has come into its own.

Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Now with a new afterword, this edition stands as an invaluable contribution to American social history. "The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family--particularly women--into the history of the cotton-mill world.--Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review "Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.--Studs Terkel "Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.--Choice

United Association for Labor Education Best Book Award The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers. The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today. Contributors: David M. Anderson | Deborah Beckel | Thomas Brown | Dana M. Caldemeyer | Adam Carson | Theresa Case | Erin L. Conlin | Brett J. Derbes | Maria Angela Diaz | Alan Draper | Matthew Hild | Joseph E. Hower | T.R.C. Hutton | Stuart MacKay | Andrew C. McKevitt | Keri Leigh Merritt | Bethany Moreton | Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan | Michael Sistrom | Joseph M. Thompson | Linda Tvrdy

Even since the last edition of this milestone text was released six years ago, unions have continued to shed members; union membership in the private sector of the economy has fallen to levels not seen since the nineteenth century; the forces of economic liberalization (neo-liberalism), capital mobility, and globalization have affected measurably the material standard of living enjoyed by workers in the United States; and mass immigration from the Southern Hemisphere and Asia has continued to restructure the domestic labor force. Yet even in the face of anti-union legislation, a continuing decline in the number of organized workers, and the fear of stateless, if not faceless terrorism—the shadow of “911” in which we still live, in preparing this new edition of his classic text Professor Dubofsky has hewn to the lines laid out in the previous seven in seeking to encourage today’s students of labor history to learn about those who built the United States and who will shape its future. In addition to taking the narrative right up to the present, a recent history that includes the election of 2008 as well as the tumultuous blow suffered by the U.S. and world economy in 2008-09, this eighth edition features an entirely new (fourth) bank of photographs and, in light of the avalanche of new scholarly work over the last decade, a complete overhauling of the book’s extensive and critical Further Readings section in order to note the very best works from the profuse recent scholarship that explores the history of working people in all its diversity.

The labor movement in the United States is a bulwark of democracy and a driving force for social and economic equality. Yet its stories remain largely unknown to Americans. Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti edit a collection of essays focused on nationwide efforts to propel the history of labor and working people into mainstream narratives of US history. In Part One, the contributors concentrate on ways to collect and interpret worker-oriented history for public consumption. Part Two moves from National Park sites to murals to examine the writing and visual representation of labor history. Together, the essayists explore how place-based labor history initiatives promote understanding of past struggles, create awareness of present challenges, and support efforts to build power, expand democracy, and achieve justice for working people. A wide-ranging blueprint for change, Where Are the Workers? shows how working-class perspectives can expand our historical memory and inform and inspire contemporary activism. Contributors: Jim Beauchesne, Rebekah Bryer, Rebecca Bush, Conor Casey, Rachel Donaldson, Kathleen Flynn, Elijah Gaddis, Susan Grabski, Amanda Kay Gustin, Karen Lane, Rob Linné, Erik Loomis, Tom MacMillan, Lou Martin, Scott McLaughlin, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Karen Sieber, and Katrina Windon

From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself. Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni